Friday, July 11, 2008

TreTower

Our next stop was at Tretower Court and Castle. Thought this was a really interesting place - the main attraction being actually the Manor House, rather than the castle ruins next door. But our first order of business was Lunch, none the less. In general we saw very few other tourists when we were about, though in fact a tour bus did pull in here before we were gone. But we frequently felt we had these places nearly to ourselves. So - we made ourselves comfortable up in one of the bedrooms and had our picnic.

When done, we returned to the entry and purchased the audio tour players - for what turned out to be a very effective tour through the site.

We learned a lot here about architectural features of the time. For instance how the solid wood paneling would divid up the large rooms you now see in castle ruins. The grooves in these posts and joists show where there were wall panels and in some cases ceiling panels.

Preserved wood paneling.

Recreated paneling, I think, into a 3 room set up for the kichen, buttery and pantry, complete with the 'sky light' grill from the kitchen into the serving room on this side of the door.

Interesting that at Chepstow Castle they described the same 3 room setup at the end of the great hall. You can see a handy pass-through with shutter low down and to the right of the furthest door.

Treower Court is so called because as the Manor House of the area, it served as the judicial seat in addition to the military and financial headquarters. Such is the feudal system that was introduced to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. The original great hall in the manor was at some point split into two levels to add a second story, As there were no hallways above, they added the external gallery so that traffic would not have to travel through each of the new upstairs rooms.

A good examples of the 'wattle and dab' technique for plastering the spaces between timbers: